My friend, a former colleague and his friend, and I went to Flushing today for a food crawl in hopes of discovering new and interesting foods. The one thing that hasn’t changed in New York for me is the constant discovery of new, interesting dishes across the different regions of China represented in Flushing. It feels like every single time I go back to Flushing, as I am going into basement food stalls or the new and shiny food malls of New World Food Court or New York Food Court (as it’s generically called along Roosevelt Avenue), I’m discovering yet another region or city’s cuisine I’ve never heard of, but is just as delicious or more delicious than the dishes I have been acquainted with. Today, the three of us visited six different spots to grab food, and all were delicious. I got to have my beloved Happy Lemon salted cheese green tea with lychee jelly and introduced it to both of them.. and they loved it, even despite the initial skepticism of “salted cheese with tea — what?!” I realized the best way to sell this concept: “If you like salted caramel, then you will like salted cheese with tea.” This ended up working, and one of them was tempted to get a second drink. I even found a stall that served very similar fish and chive dumplings to Shandong Mama in Melbourne, so I will definitely be going back there. But the most surprising thing we ate today was Luo si fen, which is a pork bone and river snail soup with mixian (Yunnan) style slippery rice noodles, beef, pickled bamboo, and vegetables. The broth was sour, salty, hot and numbing like the Sichuanese peppercorns. It was kind of addictive. Even though we kept scooping through the soup to find snails, there were none. I read later that in this soup, the snails actually don’t get served; they’re merely there to “flavor” the broth. But if you think about it… do snails really have any real flavor on their own..? Regardless of that, it was definitely a highlight of the food crawl today.

Being in Flushing today and eating all the super cheap, delicious food reminded me yet again of how much I love this neighborhood and really should spend more time discovering new things there. There’s always a delicious, cheap find around the corner there. When you think of all the expensive and “just okay” meals in Manhattan, it’s really such a small price to pay to trek out to Flushing and have such a good experience there every single time.

I originally started my Friday thinking it would be a catch-up day: I could log all my meetings of the week, have a few external meetings, two internal, and pretty much be done for the day by 4:30 and try to leave early to cook the planned butter chickpeas (the vegan version of “butter chicken”) in my Instant Pot tonight. Unfortunately, that did not happen, as more meetings appeared on my calendar, more tasks I forgot to take care of had to be dealt with, and then, the worst part of the day: my Gmail just failed.

I was working on an important email in “draft” form for about an hour, and I had promised someone internally I would get this back to her by end of day today. By around 2pm, I was pretty much finished with it and still had it in draft form, but I wanted to read it over before finally hitting “Send.” Well, 5pm comes by, and when I check my draft folder… the email is in its original state it was in this morning, as in, all it had was the title and two questions I needed to answer in the body.

I almost had a melt down. I stared at my draft folder in disbelief. I hit “Refresh” probably about 10 times to no avail. It wouldn’t update. For a good minute, all I could think was… “Oh my god. Fucking hell.”

And this was all because of a bug with a Gmail plug-in I need to use for work, an issue that is still pending and far from being resolved.

I ended up leaving at 7. This week seriously could not have been more full of angst, and it certainly ended with even more angst.

Our new chief revenue officer is in town visiting from San Francisco, so he invited us all to happy hour at a nearby spot after work.

What is frustrating when members of our executive team come out to New York is that the same types of congregations tend to happen: people on the “leadership” team tend to all gather around each other, sharing inside jokes and discussions around matters that the rest of us not only are not aware of but are never looped into, so if we tried to insert ourselves, we’d have no idea what the heck we are listening to and whether we even should be standing there. Then, there’s pretty much everyone else. And everyone else tries to make small talk with the leaders who are visiting, but it really just remains that: temporary small talk until they get uncomfortable or bored or both, and then the conversation ends, resulting in their moving on to the more familiar (and lower level) people in the office who they can have comfortable, everyday conversation with. Sameness attracts sameness, and sameness breeds sameness… unless someone at the top actually makes a thoughtful effort to counter it. And, well, that is clearly not happening.

I dislike this. The whole point of having a leader host a happy hour is so that he can get to know the remote employees better, but this rarely is the case. It ends up just being another event where everyone spends time with who is familiar or of a similar level or position, and the company ends up paying for all our drinks because it’s a social work event. This really needs to change.

I met with a customer today for coffee and monkey bread at City Bakery, a still-trendy bakery here in Manhattan where ladies who brunch still come for their nibbles, $4 cookies and monkey bread, and fancy lattes and cappuccinos. As we sat and caught up, I presented her with a baby gift for her soon-to-arrive baby boy due in just two weeks’ time. She works in the fashion industry and is always incredibly well put together, all the way down to her accessories. She’s the kind of woman who always looks like she barely even tries to look as fashionable as she does; it just seems to come naturally to her. Some of us, like myself, actually have to try.

She told me that she’s been lucky in that she’s had a relatively easy pregnancy, especially after the first trimester, when she felt nauseated all the time. But since then, she’s really enjoyed the entire experience. “Everyone is just constantly willing to give up their seat for me, help me with my bags or anything I’m carrying, or make space for me!” she exclaimed. Even at Whole Foods, if you’re pregnant or pushing around a stroller, apparently you can bypass the line and get rung up right away, she learned and shared with me. She said she’s really going to miss all these pregnancy perks after she’s given birth.

I never even though about that when I think about the concept of being pregnant. But part of me felt a little cynical in that, would I get the same preferential/deferential treatment that she gets as a relatively attractive, tall, slim white woman who is visibly pregnant? White women in general will always get treated better than any women of color. It’s a frustrating question to contemplate in my reality.

When I lived in San Francisco and attended schools that had what felt like anywhere between 40-60 percent Asian students, I never really thought much about race, whether it was that of the people around me or my own. When you’re surrounded by people who look just like you, race is not an obvious thing to think about because your world is more or less homogenous. Race becomes something you think about when you are the minority, when you are the one who stands out or is different than the rest. Because of that, when I am in work meetings, whether it’s onsite with a customer or in group meetings where a lot of our leadership team is present, I’m always deathly aware of not only my race, but also my gender. Oftentimes, I am the only person of color in a room, and in addition, I am oftentimes one of very few if any women in the room. It’s not uncommon for me to be sitting at a conference table fully surrounded by white men.

I was telling this to my manager, who is leaving the organization soon for another role. He’s ethnically Chinese but born and raised in Ohio, which is obviously a very white part of the country. He was surprised. “Really? Wow. I never really think about that that much when I’m in meetings,” he said. “But to be fair, you do have a lot of customers in the South.”

While that’s true, our company is headquartered in San Francisco, which is not in the south. I work out of our New York City office, where everyone who is considered a member of the leadership team is white and male. Plus, it’s strange to me that he, as an Asian male from a very white part of this country, would not think much about race, given that he would have stuck out as a minority where he is originally from. It’s the exact opposite mindset of what I would have assumed.

It’s a luxury to never have to think about race and gender. But that luxury usually belongs to the white males of the world, doesn’t it? And I suppose in this case, it also applies to just males of the world who may have been predominantly surrounded by white males, so then he suddenly becomes race-blind, as well?

Tonight, we had a farewell dinner and karaoke night to send off our colleague and my boss, who is leaving us for another tech company. While stuffing my face with barbecued pork belly and ribeye and getting my throat sore once again from all the belted singing at Karaoke City, I reveled once again in what a good crew I have at work. At my last job, I was always waiting to leave. I didn’t want to spend any time outside of work to see anyone off ever. Happy hours? Forget it. You’d never see me there, and I always made up some excuse. Here, it actually is fun to spend time with colleagues outside of work and to do silly things like karaoke together. And funnily enough, as I was having these thoughts, I was reminded that the last company I was at just had a massive layoff where so many of the people I despised got let go. It’s amazing they are still even in existence as a company given how unethical, sexist, and racist they were. But I will say…. Schadenfreude. Mmmm, that tastes good.

A colleague who has recently joined my team is probably one of the bluntest people I’ve ever met in the workplace. She has very little filter on her, but I actually kind of appreciate it. She was venting to me the other day that all sales people are just phony and opportunistic, that they rarely do anything to help you unless they expect something from you.

While there is some grain of truth to that, it would be nice if that person proactively offered to do something beneficial for you first. I’ve felt like I can’t really have a relationship with any sales person that is just because they want to know me or stay in touch me. The case in point is a call I had today with a former colleague, also in sales, who was in a sales role here and is now doing sales at another company. Out of the blue, she texted me last week to ask how I was doing, to catch up…. and of course, that she heard I was working on a certain brand she was prospecting and wanted to get some information from me. From the outset, when you meet her, you do think she is genuinely kind and well, genuine. But there’s always something else that she wants from you other than just to “catch up.”

I’m still waiting to meet a sales person who I can say is just a truly good, well meaning, and not opportunistic person.